Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.

It’s easy to blame all this on the modern feminist movement, but it’s also easy to say, “It’s easy to blame all this on the modern feminist movement.” And while the whole situation looks like a dead-end for girls and a feast for amoral guys (which it is), it’s hard for me to read the voluminous anecdotal evidence without thinking everyone involved is trapped in a world that they know, deep down, they weren’t made for.